Tuesday, October 14, 2014

...Why are debtors receiving so little relief? As I said, it’s about righteousness — the sense that any kind of debt forgiveness would involve rewarding bad behavior. In America, the famous Rick Santelli rant that gave birth to the Tea Party wasn’t about taxes or spending — it was a furious denunciation of proposals to help troubled homeowners. In Europe, austerity policies have been driven less by economic analysis than by Germany’s moral indignation over the notion that irresponsible borrowers might not face the full consequences of their actions...

...But it has been very hard to get either the policy elite or the public
to understand that sometimes debt relief is in everyone’s interest.
Instead, the response to poor economic performance has essentially been
that the beatings will continue until morale improves...